Enhancing web-based business with SSD drives

In recent years, businesses have been clamoring to deploy their operational applications, software and data through off-site cloud services. Without the need for on-premise hardware and maintenance teams, organizations can significantly reduce their budget costs without experiencing a drop in performance. In addition, cloud service providers offer the flexibility to deploy applications when needed, meaning businesses do not have to pay for software licenses they infrequently use.

Interest in software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud computing has increased substantially as of late. A recent market study released by Gartner found that 77 percent of respondents said they intended to increase their SaaS spending. In addition, 17 percent said they would maintain their current investment rates. Gartner officials reportedly expected such positive results, as interest in cloud services has been on the rise for some time now.

"Seeing such high intent to increase spending isn't a huge surprise as the adoption of the on-demand deployment model has grown for more than a decade, but its popularity has increased significantly within the past five years," Gartner research vice-president Charles Eschinger said.

Facilitating web-based software performance
From a service provider's standpoint, the increasing demand for web-based software solutions has placed additional importance on end user performance needs. If the functionality of a cloud application suffers and users are unable to receive the responsiveness they expect, cloud service providers may face a high level of customer churn as dissatisfied clients drop their services in favor of a competitor's offerings. To prevent this scenario from occurring, cloud service providers can deploy SSD drives in their server rooms to improve the performance of their applications.

As noted in a March TechInsidr blog post, traditional hard disk drives can produce operational bottlenecks that may result in significant latency periods when launching applications. According to the source, Google identified latency as a major factor that could adversely impact user experience and lead to a drop in advertising revenue. The search engine juggernaut determined that a single 400 millisecond delay could cause a -0.59 percent change in searches. While that may seem like a trivial number, a negative swing could result in a substantial loss of revenue considering the massive number of searches entered into Google each day.

Solid state technology effectively avoids many of these latency issues because it operates on NAND flash-based memory, allowing for systems to access applications and files with greater ease and speed. For instance, TechInsidr explained that Salesforce.com, a $19.5 billion dollar web-based software vendor, leveraged SSD drives to facilitate its performance needs. The two main benefits that the company experienced using solid state devices were improved reliability and responsiveness. An operation on that scale necessitates an exceedingly high level of server performance to accommodate its high request volume. SSD drives can help shoulder that workload without critical equipment becoming overwhelmed. In addition, solid state technology can ensure that the end user is being provided with an application service that operates at an optimal level.